LISTEN TO NAVID NASR
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One domino falls and god willing the rest will too. – Sylvia Haider
Outside the White House on Saturday was a sight to behold. Just yards apart, protests were taking place about Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and Libya. Navid Nasr, a local activist, conducted a guided tour of the protests, beginning with the largest of the demonstrations.
That morning’s Washington Post said of Yemen: “A new sense of national identity is spreading across Yemen’s divided society as rival tribesmen and political foes unite to oust President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who on Friday said he would step aside as long as he could deliver power to ‘safe hands.’ Tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators took to the streets Friday to demand Saleh’s ouster. Once-privileged members of Saleh’s Hashid tribe marched side by side with southerners persecuted by his regime. They chanted, ‘One demand, one Yemen.’ The national anthem blared over loudspeakers. ‘We are of one heart because we all have the same demand: Ali Abdullah Saleh has to leave,” said Abdulrahman Saeed, 18, a student.”
Nasr said, “Saleh is still firmly the U.S.’s man in Yemen, even if his generals are defecting. Any U.S. citizen should be ashamed of what the Obama administration is doing with regards to Yemen; should be ashamed of what is happening with not just the passive assent but the active aid of the U.S. government in Yemen. People are getting slaughtered. People are getting imprisoned. People are getting tortured.”
“They want their country back from someone who has ruled it for way too long, with an iron fist. Yemen is more than a military base and a place for the U.S. to dump its torture victims. It’s a country with its own history. It’s a country that wishes to be free. It’s one of the most impoverished countries in the world… and the economic policies that have been implemented by Saleh at the behest of the U.S. have not helped in that regard at all. The Yemenis wish to be free and I think they deserve it.”
Directly following her speech before hundreds of demonstrators, Sylvia Haider, a Yemeni-American from the Bronx said, “[Yemenis] want to be able to break free from the daily oppression… They want to be able to create their own manifest destiny… And they can’t do that when they’re hungry because they don’t have any jobs. And they don’t have any jobs because of a corrupt government.”
Haider said of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, and now throughout the middle east: “It’s rare that this kind of environment and this feeling, this euphoria, if you will, comes around. And so rather than just sit around and let it go, people are trying to capitalize on it for a positive good… The point is that [the uprisings are] all interconnected. So one domino falls and god willing the rest will too.”
Just a few steps away from the Yemen demonstration was the Syrian protest. Saturday’s Washington Post noted, “Syrian security forces fired live ammunition and tear gas rounds at protesters Friday, killing an undetermined number of people, as unrest that had been mostly contained in a small southwestern city erupted across the country, including the capital, Damascus.”
Nasr said, “[T]here is a great deal of repression in Syria. We’re talking about a presidency which is essentially dynastic in nature. Hafez Assad died and the presidency passed to the son. That’s not really a presidency, that’s a sort of like a monarchy. You’re talking about a dynasty. The people have very legitimate grievances in Syria.”
“The people in Yemen are calling for revolution. The people in Syria just want some reforms, some democratic reforms, some freedoms given to them. And I think they deserve it. I think that Assad will be doing himself a favor and his supporters across the wider Arab world a favor by doing that. And if he doesn’t do that the people have a right to do whatever it is that they deem best. It’s their country. It’s not Assad’s country. It’s almost exactly the situation that we’re talking about in Yemen, it just happens to be that the nature of the relationship between the governments and the U.S. is radically different. That’s all.”
The overwhelming sentiment of the various protests was captured by signs like the one that read, “People want to overthrow the regime.” The pro-government Bahraini protest was the exception to this. Saturday’s Washington Post read, “Bahrain’s security forces fired tear gas and pellets at anti-government protesters in the Gulf kingdom… after thousands of people poured out of Muslim prayer services Friday and demonstrated against the country’s ruling dynasty. Riot police, backed by soldiers, released thick clouds of tear gas to disperse protesters in Shiite villages.”
Nasr said, “The protest movement in Bahrain is years old. In Bahrain essentially you’re talking about a situation of, I’m hesitant to use this word but I will use it because Bahrainis themselves have used it, which is apartheid. You’re talking about a situation where 70 percent of the population has very little rights. They’re relegated to slums. They have few hope[s] of employment. And by 70 percent I’m talking about the majority Shiia population. You’re talking about a country that has been ruled by dictate by the Al Khalifa regime. The Al Khalifa family imposed themselves on the island of Bahrain many, many, many years ago. They rule it as a dynasty. It’s a monarchy, Bahrain. And the majority of the Bahraini people want democracy. They’re tired of the monarchy. Unfortunately there is a great deal of sectarianism in Bahrain. A great deal of people have privilege at the expense of the 70 percent who don’t. And they don’t want to see any fundamental change happen in Bahrain.”
The final stop on the guided tour was Libya. Saturday’s Washington Post noted, “The United States and its allies are considering whether to supply weapons to the Libyan opposition as coalition airstrikes fail to dislodge government forces from around key contested towns, according to U.S. and European officials.”
Nasr said, “In Libya you have an interesting situation. You have people who’ve been ruled by one man for forty two years, which is Muammar Gaddafi. Forty two years he’s been in power. And many of his people want freedom, want to be out from under his rule. It’s a very complex situation because [of] the nature of Gaddafi: for years he was looked up to as sort of like a heroic figure in the third world. He armed and funded various liberation movements like the Irish Republican Army, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the African National Congress. He’s still friends with Nelson Mandela and with the ANC luminaries. He’s friends with various liberation movements that are going on right now in Latin America. So that’s part of the reality. It’s also reality that he used Libya’s oil wealth to sort of build up the infrastructure of the country and give the people a little bit of a higher standard of living.
“The other side of the reality is that for… the past seven/eight years, Gaddafi has sort of been brought in from the cold, so to speak. No longer a member of the Axis of Evil, he was given a seat at the table. Tony Blair shook hands with him. He had an audience… with the Bush White House. And part of being brought in from the cold, as is natural almost, is that he was required to implement these economic reforms, these austerity measures, which in a very short amount of time have undid a lot of the genuine, more equitable economic progress that was made in Libya in the early years of his administration… [M]ost of [the economic gains] have gone by the wayside thanks to the measures that he has implemented in Libya in order to continue to be on the good side of the U.S., Italy, France, Germany, the U.K., etc, the very people who are bombing his forces right now.”